NZ Auto Traps has designed a trap that turns off during the day to avoid killing native birds, and can reset itself. Photo: Supplied/ NZ Auto Traps
Artificial intelligence is making conservation efforts faster and easier in the fight for total pest eradication, with new traps able to tell predator from protected species.
The audacious goal of Predator Free 2050 is to see rats, stoats, ferrets, weasels and possums entirely gone from New Zealand's shores by 2050 - but some say it is going to take more than an upscaling of present resources to get there.
Predator Free New Zealand Trust chief executive Jessi Morgan said technology advancements are going to be crucial, considering the size of the country, and the remoteness of some areas.
"We don't actually have the tools and tech to do this [project] at scale," she said.
Innovation was needed.
A possum viewed through the lens of the NZ Auto Traps artificial intelligence trap. Photo: Supplied/ NZ Auto Traps
Dr Helen Blackie, research lead at Critter Solutions, explained their trap used AI to identify species.
"If an animal comes up to the trap, it's able to think for itself and decide what animal that is, and if it recognises it as a pest species it triggers the trap, and if it recognises it as being a non-target species or a native species, it's able to make sure it doesn't activate itself."
She said it had allowed them to shift away from designs that tried to deter non-target species by making the traps hard to get into - most animals were much more likely to enter a trap that looked open and inviting, she said.
"So our idea was, if you could remove all that and come up with a really open design for animals, and use AI to decide whether that was a pest or not, we were able to revolutionise the way that we were designing the traps in the first place."
Dr Helen Blackie says artificial intelligence is a useful tool to use against pests to help New Zealand eradicate introduced predators. Photo: supplied
Their traps were also being used to kill feral cats in Australia: These could closely resemble possums, which were protected in Australia, she said.
"If you've got a black possum and a black cat, you've got to make sure you've got really good quality data fed into the AI models to account for those circumstances."
The Critter Solutions trap, which uses facial recognition to differentiate between target and protected species. Photo: Supplied/ Critter Solutions - Lawrence Sheddan
Another innovator was Whakatāne-based NZ Auto Traps, which had about 700 traps throughout the country.
Fully automatic, they could reset without human intervention. These traps turned off during the day to avoid harming native birds - but species like kākā and kea came out at night, too.
A possum viewed through the lens of the NZ Auto Traps artificial intelligence trap.
NZ Auto Traps operations manager Haydn Steel said they avoided killing the wrong species by using a camera that sent pictures to an internal computer with an algorithm trained on masses of photos of rats and possums, and would only activate the trap if it was a match.
A trial was underway to make sure the AI was airtight, before putting it into kea habitats.
"We've had traps in kea enclosures for quite a while, got a couple of thousand images, and they've all come back at zero percent that it's a target species, so the trap stayed deactivated the whole time," Steel said. "So if [the] kea was to put his head in, that would be safe."
He said automated traps were key to keeping the cost of labour down.
"If we're going to do the Predator Free 2050 thing, the cost per hectare needs to be way lower."
Overseas, their traps were catching rats and mongooses in the likes of Hawaii, Mauritius, and the Dominican Republic, as well as tree snakes in Guam.
Predator Free's Jessi Morgan said companies would use that cash injection to fund research and development at home.
Many of these advancements were the result of past funding coming to fruition - and it was not so forthcoming these days.
"It is challenging, and so that's why that global market piece is really interesting. Can there be investment from other countries, perhaps, who are also interested in this space?"
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